Authors

Spider and Jeanne Robinson Bio

Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won 3 Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and numerous other international and regional honours. Most of his 35 books are still in print, in 10 languages. His short work has appeared in magazines from OMNI and Analog to Xhurnal Izobretatl i Rationalizator (Moscow), and in numerous anthologies. His most recent novel is VERY HARD CHOICES [Tor hc/pb]. The newsgroup alt.callahans and its offshoots, inspired by Spider's Callahan's Place series, were the largest non-porn network in cyberspace for nearly a decade.

In 2004 he was chosen by the Heinlein Prize Trust to write VARIABLE STAR [Tor], a novel based on an outline created in 1955 by the first Grandmaster of Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein. In 2008 he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for Outstanding Body Of Work in the Field of Literature.

Spider was born in New York City in 1948, and holds a BA in English from the State University of New York. He moved to Canada permanently in 1973. He was book reviewer for Galaxy , Analog and New Destinies magazines for nearly a decade, and his op-ed column "Future Tense" appeared in The Globe and Mail , Canada's national newspaper, from 1996-2005. In 2001 he released Belaboring the Obvious , a CD featuring original music accompanied by Alberta guitar legend Amos Garrett. He was the first-ever Writer In Residence at Vancouver's H.R. MacMillan Space Centre from 2004-5.

Spider has been joyously married for over 35 years to Jeanne Robinson , a Boston-born writer, choreographer, former Modern dancer, and teacher of dance and the Alexander Technique; she studied at the Boston Conservatory, the Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins schools, Nikolais/Louis Dance Theatre Lab, Toronto Dance Theatre, and the American Dance Festival. She also studied under Hawkins principal dancer Beverly Brown, and performed with Beverly Brown Dancensemble, at the 1981 Riverside Dance Festival in New York.

The Robinsons collaborated on the Hugo-, Nebula- and Locus-winning STARDANCE TRILOGY [hc omnibus by Baen, '06], which created the concept and basic principles of zero-gravity dance. Jeanne had just made NASA's list for a Space Shuttle seat, to try out zero-G dance in practice--when the Challenger Tragedy on Jan. 28, 1986 ended the Civilian In Space program. She's now co-producing a film version of "Stardance" with James Sposto and David Gerrold, and has already done preliminary choreography in free fall aboard Zero-G Corp's modified-727, G-Force One. http://www.stardancemovie.com

In 2006 Jeanne and Spider were, by chance, each separately invited by First Lady Laura Bush to dine with her and the President, and to read aloud from their work on the National Mall during the Library of Congress's National Book Festival. (Spider was asked to read from VARIABLE STAR and Jeanne from THE STARDANCE TRILOGY.)

The Robinsons met in the woods of Nova Scotia in the early 1970s. Their daughter Terri and her husband Heron recently presented them with a grandchild, Marisa Alegria da Silva. They have lived for the last 10 years on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, where they raise and exhibit prize hopes.